We are Thankful

Happy Thanksgiving from all your 1st grade friends.  There are so many wonderful people and things we are thankful for each and everyday.

I am thankful for my lovable first grade family.  Happy Turkey Day!

Best Part of Me

1st graders should be SO proud of their Best Part of Me project! As a class, we read the book The Best Part of Me by Wendy Ewald. This book is written by real students and served as inspiration to us in Writer's Workshop. 1st graders wrote about their favorite part of themselves, then worked on adding descriptive words to their writing. After our pieces were published, we recorded ourselves reading our very own writing. We had a special screening today with Mrs. Higgin's 1st graders, our Kindergarten buddies and Mrs. Carreiro, where students were so excited to see their published work.  Enjoy!

K Buddies

1st graders have begun working and meeting with their Kindergarten buddies.  We love Thursdays when Mrs. Newton's class comes to visit.  

So far buddies have shared poetry binders, shared a reader's theater skit and explored the iPads.  

This week in order to get ready for Thanksgiving, buddies designed beautiful feathers for Tom the Turkey.  Buddies sat together and discussed different people, things, and places they are thankful for.  After their discussion students designed a thankful feather with pictures, words or labels.  Check out how beautiful Tom turned out!

 

Floppy Turkey

1st graders have been discussing how the Pilgrims and Native Americans, particularly the Wampanoags, lived differently than we do.  It was pretty hard to learn life hasn't always been iPads, computers and fast cars.  We used a variety of books and online sources to help us learn about life back then compared to life now.

With old floppy discs still laying around and the fact that I love to put free things to good use, 1st graders created floppy turkeys.  After it was clarified that a floppy disc is not a calculator or a camera and no the disc inside does not come out to play a movie, students got busy decorating feathers.

On the left side, 1st graders wrote something that the Pilgrims or Wampagnoags had then and on the right side students compared it to what we have now. We brainstormed so many different ideas about how their lives were different than ours. For example, the Pilgrim boys wore dresses until the age of six or seven but now boys wear jeans or shorts.  Pilgrims and Wampagnoags played games like ten pin and marbles but now we have computers, TV, iPods and iPads but thankfully no more floppy discs only floppy turkeys.

Character Adjectives

For our final Global Read Aloud project, 1st graders illustrated a character from our beloved Marty McGuire book.  Students used the iPads as a digital tool to create these detailed illustrations.  Once illustrations were complete, students thought of adjectives to describe their character.  Check out our final project created with a new app animoto.

After our animoto video was complete, we tweeted it out to Kate Messner, the author of Marty McGuire.  Kate Messner then posted and tweeted about our wonderful artwork!  Check out her tweet:  

After viewing Kate's blog and watching her author videos, we were ecstatic that she acknowledged our hard work.  Twitter might be one of our new favorite things! 

Give Me Five, Turkey!

I am always shocked that some students have never made a hand turkey before. I guess you have to learn everything somewhere and what better place then 1st grade! Check out our hand turkeys:

 
These turkeys quickly turned into mathematical tools. We'll use them to help us count by fives throughout the month of November. 

Make sure to practice counting by fives at home. Mix it up by starting from any number. Use your hand turkeys to help or nickels to make sure your child really understands how to count automatically by fives.